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This year's Annual Plan comes at a time of growing uncertainty, volatility and complexity for the world and for the Wikimedia movement. Globally, the role of trusted information online is increasingly important and more under threat than ever before. Organizations and online platforms must navigate a changing internet that is more polarized and fragmented. New ways of searching for information, including chat-based search, are gaining traction. The ease of creating AI machine-generated content creates both opportunity and risk for Wikimedia's role as a human-led, tech-enabled knowledge system, as well as for Wikimedia's financial model.

As we face into these headwinds, the Foundation's annual and multi-year planning continues to be guided by the movement's 2030 Strategic Direction. Changes in the world around us make this direction more relevant than ever. A call to become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge is more than just an inspirational statement – it is a mandate to continually assess the sustainability of our projects and organizations in response to the shifting landscape around us.

The purpose of the Wikimedia movement continues to be grounded in the two key pillars of our Strategic Direction:

  1. Knowledge Equity: "advance our world by collecting knowledge that fully represents human diversity."
  2. Knowledge as a Service: "build the services and structures that enable others to do the same."

As a movement, we must continue providing trustworthy information to the world, and nurture volunteers that drive content creation and curation across more than 320 languages.

In this Annual Plan, we celebrate the success of many groups and individuals who are working to advance various Movement Strategy Recommendations alongside the Foundation's core work. In the years to come, the Foundation will also begin to signal more clearly where some recommendations are more informative than others in our collective pursuit of the 2030 Strategic Direction.

And we must plan even further ahead. Looking beyond 2030 is vital to our mission, which requires us to "make and keep useful information … available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity." For decades, Wikipedia content has consistently appeared on the first page of 99% of Google searches. It has even been described as the "factual netting that holds the whole digital world together".

And yet, the shift from a link-based search architecture – which has served our projects and financial model well up to this point – to a chat-based search architecture is in its early days, but likely here to stay. We believe this is part of a generational shift in how people create and consume information online. These changes are accelerating as the internet has become more diverse and global, and less English-dominated.

What emerges is a strategic paradox: Wikimedia projects are becoming more vital to the knowledge infrastructure of the internet, while simultaneously becoming less visible to internet users. They are more vital, because Wikipedia is being ingested by large language models that are shaping the future of information retrieval, including search but also beyond it. By many estimates, English Wikipedia forms the largest single source of training data ingested by ChatGPT – and among the highest-weighted for quality. Generally speaking, this is a good thing. Trustworthy AI needs a trustworthy fact base.

At the same time, Wikimedia content is becoming less visible as part of the internet's essential infrastructure because an increasingly closed and AI-mediated internet doesn't attribute the source of the facts, or even link back to Wikipedia. The social contract that underpins third-party use of content is under pressure. While the ultimate impact of AI remains to be seen, the impact of this pressure over time may contribute to some of our declining metrics like regional traffic and new contributors.

Any annual plan must be informed by multi-year and multigenerational strategies that advance our mission in perpetuity. Anchored in Wikimedia's movement strategy, the Foundation continues to engage in three areas to inform our multi-year planning and projections:

  1. FINANCIAL MODEL: Wikimedia's financial model and future projections for revenue streams in online fundraising (which we anticipate will not continue to grow at the same rate as in the past), the next phase of the Wikimedia Endowment, and the lessons we have learned so far from Wikimedia Enterprise.
  2. PRODUCT and TECHNOLOGY: Centering the Foundation's role to support the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement, understanding the needs of our many different contributor communities, leading innovations for future audiences, as well as evolving our infrastructure for a changing external landscape.
  3. ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES: More focused conversations to establish frameworks and principles for understanding the Foundation's core roles and responsibilities. This is intended to help to provide inputs into the movement charter deliberations and broader movement strategy conversations.

Similar to last year, this year's plan remains focused on the central importance of technology, given the Foundation's role as platform provider for communities leading peer-to-peer knowledge production systems around the world. The four overarching goals of this year's plan also remain constant (Infrastructure, Equity, Safety & Integrity, and Effectiveness), while the work and deliverables within each goal iterates on the progress made in the current year.

At a high level, our work for the coming year is focused on improving user experience on Wikimedia projects, providing both the ongoing maintenance needed to support a top 10 global website while also making future-focused investments to meet a changing internet. We will develop a more equitable approach to free knowledge by addressing knowledge gaps and expanding participation in the movement, protect our people and projects from growing external threats, and help ensure Wikimedia's long-term financial sustainability and effectiveness to support the movement into the future.

The Foundation's budget reflects ongoing trade-offs, as we see a slowing rate of new revenue growth. To meet this new reality, the Foundation has slowed its growth significantly over the past two years and made reductions in staffing and expenses last year. Since 2022, funding to movement entities has outpaced the rate of growth for the Foundation, which remains the case for this year's plan.

In this mission together[edit]

Our collective goal is to help our global community work better together and with us so we can all truly become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. In the sections that follow, you will find more specific details on the work of various teams at the Foundation in support of these four goals. None of this is work that we can do alone; it will take all of us to create a world in which all people can share in the sum of all knowledge. That is why one of our core values is that we are in this mission together.

Your collaboration on-wiki here on Meta, in community spaces or on your projects's village pump (or equivalent) is welcomed.

What does the world need from us now?[edit]

This year, the Foundation is focused on four key external trends impacting our work:

  • Consumers are inundated with information, want it aggregated by trusted people
  • Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online
  • Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and content will be highly weaponized
  • Regulation poses challenges, threats and opportunities that vary by jurisdiction

As we did last year, the Foundation started planning by asking the question, "What does the world need from us and the Wikimedia projects now?" We conducted research into external trends that are impacting our work, including a larger focus on immediate, bite-sized information; increasing presence of incentives, financial and otherwise, to attract contributors to some platforms; legal and regulatory threats, including platform regulations that can be weaponized against us and our contributors, as well as opportunities to positively advance the public interest; and issues of content veracity and the effect of AI on the information ecosystem.

Last year, we took several steps in response to these external trends, including new investments in the work of the Future Audiences team, such as the development of a ChatGPT plugin, to experiment with new platforms and develop learnings about how people may want to use generative AI to interact with knowledge on the Wikimedia projects. We also created a new working group and invested in tools for better and smarter patrolling for editors with extended rights to help contributors manage the potential growth of mis and disinformation on the Wikimedia projects. We revisited and learned from these trends over the course of the year; for example, even though ChatGPT was one of the fastest growing internet platforms in history, Wikipedia did not see a significant change in readership traffic during that same time period. People still relied on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects as a source of trusted, accurate information around the world.

Talking:2024[edit]

To inform this year's Annual Plan, we began with Talking: 2024, conversations to share, listen, and learn with intention. As part of the initiative, Wikimedia Foundation Trustees, executives, and staff hosted 130 conversations on-wiki, with individuals, and in small groups – and the talking continues. These conversations stretch across all regions of the world. We continue to learn from prolific community members to recent newcomers, from technical volunteers to stewards, event organizers, and affiliate leaders.

The takeaways from these conversations also fed directly into our planning for this year, to 2030 and beyond – including thinking about what it would take to build our projects across generations:

  • We consistently heard the need for the Foundation to remain focused on upgrading technical infrastructure to supporting volunteer needs for tool maintenance and metrics. It is the most critical topic for our strategic efforts as we make tangible and practical a mission that calls for our work to continue in perpetuity. The discussions helped confirm that we continue to move more in the right direction.
  • Though technology featured prominently in most of these conversations, there remains no doubt that Wikimedia is a human-led movement. We heard how "It's all about people" and explored even more solutions that can address a familiar dilemma about how to balance the needs of existing editors with initiatives to welcome newcomers. Our human-led values came up in several conversations about Wikimedia's role in shaping the next generation of artificial intelligence.
  • The Talking: 2024 conversations also provided a space for movement entities to share a need for multi-year financial certainty in their support from the Foundation, which we will take into this annual plan. Other conversations highlighted the need to continue prioritizing limited resources and being more explicit about trade-offs.
  • Finally, the task of defining a Movement Charter came up in several conversations. These ranged from reflections about movement strategy recommendations and principles ("Will it always be first come, first served in this movement?") to questions about the purpose of different structures ("What decisions do we need the global council to make? Why are decisions moving from one center to another?" "We are taking a hammer to solve this issue when they are actually screws."). Unsurprisingly, there were varying perspectives ("The editing community in many regions doesn't see an immediate benefit in affiliates, hubs, or other governance structures." "The community still feels unheard by the Foundation." "The good work that affiliates do in certain regions is commendable, especially where those affiliates are deeply engaged with the community."). And a deep recognition of the complex task at hand ("The community is so huge and it's hard to tie everyone together.")

Foundation 2024-2025 Goals[edit]

Our approach to annual planning

Given this context, our approach to annual planning this year remains guided by the following design principles:

  • Anchor in Movement Strategy. Tie to Knowledge Equity and Knowledge as a Service as part of movement strategy.
  • Take an external perspective. Start with: what's happening in the world around us. Look outward. Identify the key External Trends impacting our work.
  • Focus on Product + Tech. Continued focus on the Foundation's role as a platform provider enabling product and technology at scale.
  • Align on four goals year on year. The four goals of the annual plan remain consistent from last year, with work that builds on the previous progress.
  • Take a longer multi-year view. Ground our annual plan in multi-year planning. Consider longer-term trends for our revenue model, tech strategy, and movement roles & responsibilities.
  • Grow funding to movement groups. Funding to movement entities has outpaced the rate at which the Foundation continues to grow.

The Wikimedia Foundation has four main goals for 2024−2025. These big organizational goals have not changed from last year's plan, although the specific work and objectives underneath each goal continues to evolve. (A summary of the Foundations 2024-25 goals is also available in slide form.) These goals are designed to align with the Wikimedia Movement's Strategic Direction and Movement Strategy Recommendations, and to respond to the key external trends shaping our work.

The Wikimedia Foundation's 2024-25 goals are:

  1. INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service. Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
  2. EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen equity in decision-making via movement governance, equitable resource distribution, closing knowledge gaps, and connecting the movement.
  3. SAFETY & INTEGRITY: Protect our people and projects. Strengthen the systems that provide safety for volunteers. Defend the integrity of our projects. Advance the environment for free knowledge.
  4. EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen the Foundation's overall performance and effectiveness. Evaluate, iterate and adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

2024-25 Goal Summary[edit]

This section provides an overview of the key work inside each of the Foundation's goals.

GOAL 1: INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service by focusing on wiki experience, future audiences, and signals and data services.

  • WIKI EXPERIENCES
    • Contributor experience: Help experienced and new contributors rally together to build a trustworthy encyclopedia.
    • Consumer experience: Engage a new generation of readers and donors to build a lasting connection with encyclopedic content.
    • MediaWiki: Evolve the MediaWiki platform and interfaces to meet Wikipedia's core needs.
  • FUTURE AUDIENCES
    • Test hypotheses. Test future-oriented hypotheses to better understand technology trends, online behavior, and extend the reach of Wikipedia's content.
  • SIGNALS & DATA SERVICES
    • Metrics: Track and publish essential metrics to understand our impact and inform decision-making.
    • Experimentation platform: Launch a robust experimentation platform to better evaluate the impact of product features.

GOAL 2: EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity by focusing on movement governance and decision-making, equitable resource distribution, closing knowledge gaps and connecting the movement.

  • MOVEMENT GOVERNANCE
    • Decision-making: Support effective and equitable movement decision-making. Ensure volunteers understand and can fully participate in key movement processes (eg, Charter, Global Council, Hubs, Committees).
  • RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION
    • Grantmaking: Continue to align grantmaking with Movement Strategy. Work with communities to support equitable resource distribution and bolster Affiliate fundraising capacity.
  • CLOSING KNOWLEDGE GAPS
    • Content growth: Accelerate growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content. Help communities close knowledge gaps by making our tools and support systems easier to access, adapt and improve.
  • CONNECTIONS
    • Connect the movement: Help Wikimedians connect, share and learn from peers. (eg, Wikimedian of the Year, WikiCelebrate, Regional & Global connections, Wikimania, Regional Conferences, Wikimedia Hackathon, Let's Connect.)

GOAL 3: SAFETY and INTEGRITY: Protect our people and projects by focusing on project governance support, human rights, responding to changing legal frameworks, tackling disinformation, and advancing the Wikimedia model.

  • PROTECT OUR PEOPLE
    • Trust and safety: Support project governance workflows like ArbCom, Stewards, and others who protect people and support content integrity. Work with administrators who protect against litigation and overzealous legislation.
    • Human rights: Support a safer environment for sharing, receiving, and responsibly deploying information on Wikimedia projects.
    • Scaled abuse: Protect communities and systems from scaled abuse by improving our infrastructure, tools and process.
  • PROTECT OUR PROJECTS
    • Laws & regulation: Respond to changing legal frameworks, including regulator education, legal analysis and compliance.
    • Disinformation: Continue supporting a strong, diverse community as the best defense. Support volunteer efforts via investigations, expert connections and legal defense.
  • ADVANCE OUR MODEL
    • Policy advocacy: Promote the value of Wikimedia's model in the legal and policy environment.

GOAL 4: EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen the Foundation's overall performance + effectiveness by focusing on financial sustainability and efficiency, strengthening employee engagement and effectiveness, and streamlining foundation processes.

  • FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
    • Revenue: Raise $188M for annual fund and invest in longer-term revenue strategies.
    • Efficiency: Ensure our financial model meets / exceeds industry best practices; maintain a Programmatic Expense Ratio of at least 77%.
    • Affiliates: Ensure affiliates are well-positioned to engage in multi-year budgeting and planning.
  • PERFORMANCE
    • People processes: Strengthen people policies, processes and experiences to improve employee engagement and effectiveness.
    • Philanthropic mission: Expand opportunities for staff to be ambassadors for our mission with donors and the public, as part of an organizational commitment to a culture of philanthropy.
  • PROCESSES
    • Streamline Foundation processes: Create more efficient, automated and customer-centered processes. (eg, Fundraising Payment Orchestration, Enterprise Risk Management, Working Environments, Business Operations Workflows.)
    • Quarterly metrics: Implement a stronger process to review quarterly metrics and accountability against annual goals.

Progress made on last year's plan[edit]

What follows is a snapshot of highlights and progress that we've made on our 2023-2024 annual plan. We continue to share ongoing progress on our annual plan goals on Diff and in other updates.

Progress made on GOAL 1: INFRASTRUCTURE

Progress made on GOAL 2: EQUITY

Progress made on GOAL 3: SAFETY and INTEGRITY

  • EU Digital Services Act: took steps to comply with the new Digital Services Act, an act that went into effect in August 2023 that regulates internet platforms operating in the European Union.
  • Advocacy: educated regulators, policymakers and government leaders about Wikimedia's model
  • Disclosure: met our reporting and disclosure obligations, including publishing a supplemental transparency report
  • Disinformation: supported volunteers and project integrity by mapping anti-disinformation initiatives across the ecosystem; tackled disinformation on the projects in an Anti-Disinformation Repository
  • Volunteer safety: supported community measures for safety and inclusion by working with the Affiliations Committee, Case Review Committee and Ombuds Commission.

Progress made on GOAL 4: EFFECTIVENESS

  • Increased efficiency: we are on track to increase the percentage of our budget that goes to directly supporting Wikimedia's mission (our "Programmatic Efficiency Ratio") through increasing our internal efficiency around administrative and fundraising costs.
  • Additional investment into supporting the movement: this increased efficiency will enable an additional investment of $1.8M into funding in areas like grants, feature development, site infrastructure and more.

History[edit]

The Wikimedia Movement adopted the Strategic Direction in 2017. Changes in the world around us make this direction more relevant than ever. This year, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue anchoring its work in the strategic direction and focus on supporting the Wikimedia movement to become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge.

In 2020, our movement adopted a set of movement strategy recommendations, and over the past 4 years we have collectively made progress towards many of them. As we approach 2030, we will continue to iterate on new approaches that help us position the movement to serve as the infrastructure of free knowledge beyond 2030. Alongside the Movement Strategy initiatives that have been in the Foundation and other affiliates' plans since 2020, here are a few examples of the significant multi-year initiatives to respond to movement strategy recommendations:

Clarifying movement roles and responsibilities moving forward[edit]

We continue to identify ways to Ensure Equity in Decision-Making and clarify roles across the movement. The Movement Charter has been proposed to define future roles and responsibilities in the movement for better coordination and stronger impact. Since 2021, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) has drafted the text, grappling with the inevitable challenges that face a movement of our size and complexity. In June 2024, the charter will undergo a community vote.

In alignment with the principles of subsidiarity and efficiency, the Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to sharing and transferring responsibilities that other movement entities are better equipped to own. The Foundation has benefited from direct engagement with the MCDC and conversations with many stakeholders around the world to inform and shape its perspectives on future responsibilities.

Independent of the outcome of the Charter ratification vote, the Foundation believes there are immediate steps that need to be taken today to make progress towards the 2030 goals. We are already preparing these functions to be overseen jointly with volunteers. Sustained change takes time, and to do it well, we need start making these structural changes now:

  • Participatory resource allocation -  In 2020, we created the Regional Funds Committees to advise the Foundation on regional resource allocation and make funding decisions about community grants. This year, we will ask the committees to partner with the Foundation to advise on regional allocations, bringing us closer towards participatory resource allocation and ensuring greater equity in grants decision making.
  • A pilot Product and Technology Advisory Council - This concept builds on the existing Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology Committee and follows the Technology Council's movement strategy initiative. This year, we will try out a pilot to review and advise the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology work.
  • Improved Affiliate Strategy - In the previous year the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustee liaisons worked with the Affiliations Committee, affiliates, and Foundation staff to improve the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliate Strategy. This year, we will take forward the learnings and answer some key questions from the process.

External trends[edit]

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation shares a list of external trends that prompt us to look outward and ask: “as a Movement, what does the world need from us now?” Trends analysis requires us to bring a long-term view, and to closely track and monitor what feels most important to our projects, even if we may have differing perspectives about how best to respond. Given our increasingly complex and fast-changing environment, this is not a comprehensive list of threats and opportunities facing the Wikimedia movement, but rather a few of the most pressing issues we believe we now face us and have been tracking since 2020:

  1. Search: Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people
  2. Content: Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online
  3. Disinformation: Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and AI will be weaponized
  4. Regulation: Poses challenges, threats, and opportunities that vary by jurisdiction

This year, we are breaking Search and Content trends into two categories: changes in consumer preferences that are impacting online knowledge search and discovery, and changes to the where and how knowledge can be shared that impact contributor motivations.

Trend 1 - Search[edit]

Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people

Gen Z and younger millennial preference for short-form, summarized information from “authentic” personalities continues to grow. More platforms offer this than ever before (e.g., Bluesky, Twitter/X, Substack, TikTok). TikTok continues to dominate, growing in global usage and offering more search capabilities. Web search engines are piloting new AI offerings to stay competitive, but the success of these features is still uncertain.

Personalized, algorithmically driven knowledge is on the rise. In last year’s research on external trends, we noticed user trends towards apps that served rich media content like video and audio. This year, we’re seeing that more people prefer to get information from apps that offer not just rich media content, but highly personalized, algorithmically-pushed content in a variety of entertaining, easy-to-consume formats. Consumers seek charismatic, like-minded people who share their point of view to aggregate and curate knowledge.

Knowledge from objective sources (i.e., web search) is in flux. To continue to keep users engaged, search engines are releasing new AI-assisted search features that summarize results. These may become a new paradigm for web search, more severely impacting traffic to publishers’ content – or they may continue to fail to catch on. AI is not yet widely used by most consumers as a substitute for web search (though some surveys indicate that younger audiences are more trusting of ChatGPT than Google).

Trend 2 - Content[edit]

Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online

Online platforms are actively luring in experts and amateurs alike to produce more content, including knowledge content. Contributors have many choices for how and where to share knowledge seamlessly to millions of consumers, while also reaping financial and personal rewards.

Sharing knowledge is easier and more fun than ever before. New tools for creating social media content such as video and audio production tools and generative AI, formerly only available and accessible to professionals, are now available to anyone. New media types – short video, podcasts, memes, viral trends, etc. – allow for more creativity and serve different learning modes.

Sharing knowledge is more rewarding and powerful than ever before. Content contributors on social media have significant financial incentives from direct payment and brand sponsorships, social incentives from audience engagement (likes, comments, follows), and can amass huge reach quickly and directly, shaping the narrative for global audiences in the millions or billions.

Trend 3 - Disinformation[edit]

Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and AI will be weaponized

Information warfare will intensify and trust in institutions will further erode in 2024, the biggest election year in world history. Highly contested elections combined with the spread of prolonged geopolitical conflict will spur political candidates, governments, and others to use disinformation online to influence election outcomes and sway global public opinion about military conflict and social movements.

Human rights threats are growing. Physical and legal threats against volunteers and staff who fight disinformation continue to grow. Accusations of bias and inaction by those whose preferred narratives do not prevail on Wikipedia may be encouraged and amplified by purveyors of disinformation.

Generative AI brings novel challenges, but also opportunities. Governments are under pressure to assert control as GenAI fuels moral panic. The potential value of Wikimedia’s human-governed content in the world of GenAI is considerable, but in order to remain relevant we must overcome the threats we face to our content and community integrity.

Trend 4 - Regulation[edit]

Regulation poses challenges, threats, and opportunities that vary by jurisdiction

With major new platform regulation in the EU and UK, we now face unprecedented compliance requirements, especially around child safety and responsible use of AI. Stopping existentially harmful enforcement - especially in the name of child safety - requires increased education of policymakers about our model.

Law is weaponized in important jurisdictions. Bad-faith lawsuits, by people who don’t like the verified information appearing on Wikipedia pages, are succeeding in some European countries. Some incumbent leaders are abusing their powers to silence and intimidate political opponents.

Some policymakers are interested in how Wikimedia advances the public interest and sustainable development. In the European Union some politicians see Wikipedia as digital public infrastructure deserving support, becoming a model platform for using technology to promote a social good without unwarranted regulatory burden. UN bodies are asking how our projects can advance Sustainable Development Goals.

Goals[edit]

The Wikimedia Foundation has four main goals in 2024-2025. They are designed to align with the Wikimedia Movement's Strategic Direction and Movement Strategy Recommendations, and continue much of the work identified in last year's plan. They are:

  1. INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service. Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
  2. EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making within the Movement, advance equitable resource distribution, support communities to close knowledge gaps, and foster equitable global and regional connections.
  3. SAFETY & INTEGRITY: Protect our people and projects. Strengthen the systems that provide safety for volunteers. Defend the integrity of our projects. Advance the environment for free knowledge on the Wikimedia projects. (Note: this has been renamed from the Safety and Inclusion goal from last year.)
  4. EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Infrastructure

Equity

Safety & Integrity

Effectiveness

Metrics: Measuring progress toward our goals[edit]

In order to measure progress toward our goals, we have identified a limited set of core metrics that the Wikimedia Foundation plans to impact in the coming year. These metrics should motivate our work and serve as signals to indicate whether we are moving in the right direction. Where we are not seeing the impact we expect, we will adjust our work to have the impact we need.

The core metrics were selected using the following criteria:

  • We believe the metric indicates that we are moving in the right direction toward our goals.
  • We believe we can measure our progress toward impacting the metric over the course of the fiscal year.
  • We are able to measure changes in the metric on a quarterly basis so that we can course-correct as needed throughout the fiscal year.
  • We are able to measure and set a baseline before the start of the fiscal year.

The outcomes of our most impactful work need time to manifest. For this reason, we will monitor our progress using leading indicators and milestones related to each of the core metrics. In addition, there are additional data points the Foundation will monitor in the year ahead for a more complete view.

The Wikimedia Foundation has identified four main metric areas for 2024−2025.

  • CONTENT: Increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content.
  • CONTRIBUTORS: Nurture multiple generations of volunteers.
  • RELEVANCE: Ensure our relevance and sustainability to a broad audience world-wide.
  • EFFECTIVENESS: Ensure our long term sustainability by improving how the Foundation operates and scales.

Content: Increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content[edit]

Our mission is to ensure the spread of free knowledge worldwide, and the content on our projects is a key way we provide access to free knowledge. Our Movement has had incredible impact at scale and our communities have spent many years improving the content on our projects. Through experimentation and partnership, we have found impactful ways to support our communities' ongoing efforts to increase quality and reliable content. Languages, regions, and topic areas where we can most likely have an impact are where we also improve free knowledge equity globally. In view of the recent rise of AI generated content, the value of human created knowledge increases manifold. Effectiveness of the methods used to scale up growth of trusted content are indicators of healthy progress that our communities can rely on. Our focus this fiscal year is on providing tools and systems that support the ability of contributors to identify and close knowledge gaps.

Contributors: Nurture multiple generations of volunteers[edit]

Wikipedia’s success and global reach depends on the sustainability of our volunteer communities, who do the work of building and protecting the projects. We know from talking with volunteers, from data and research, and from trends in the outside world that the sustainability of our communities is at risk. The Foundation helps ensure the success and health of our communities in many ways: by improving tools for experienced editors, building ways for newcomers to quickly and effectively contribute, fostering regional and global connections, working to protect volunteers whose safety is threatened, supporting volunteer governance, and providing grants for movement affiliates.

We aim to nurture multiple generations of volunteers and build thriving volunteer communities. Because our communities are diverse and have many different contributor roles (functionaries, organizers, content editors, newcomers, etc), we will use multiple measures to evaluate our progress. These measures are built from contribution data in our projects, community sentiment surveys, and measures of program outputs.

  • Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goals of Infrastructure, Equity, and Safety & Integrity.
  • Measurement: We will measure our success this year based on achieving the key results outlined under Infrastructure, Equity, and Safety & Integrity. We will monitor the impact of our work across multiple points in the contributor journey, from newcomers to experienced editors, administrators, and moderators.

Relevance: Ensure our relevance and sustainability to a broad audience world-wide[edit]

Wikipedia is a resource for the world to find, learn, and share free knowledge. We in part judge the success of our work based on our readership, reuse of freely licensed content, and our ability to fundraise to sustain our broad Movement's objectives. The free knowledge Movement faces multiple challenges. Knowledge seekers are turning to short form, personality-driven content. Search is changing with the rise of AI. Social media platforms use video, audio, and ML-driven recommendation algorithms rather than text and the open web to engage audiences. Facing these challenges requires new thinking on multiple fronts – fundraising, finding new audiences, and creatively engaging with a changing world.

  • Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goal of Infrastructure.
  • Measurement: We aim to increase the number of unique devices on Wikipedia. We will measure our success this year based on achieving the key results outlined under Infrastructure.

Effectiveness: Ensure our long-term sustainability by improving how the Foundation operates and scales[edit]

We have selected programmatic expense ratio as our metric for the Foundation’s effectiveness. Programmatic expense ratio is a measure of the amount of funding that goes to programs versus administrative expenses. It is a commonly used and well-defined financial accountability measure employed by services like Charity Navigator to evaluate the efficacy of non-profits. This measure is based on publicly available information from our Form 990 filing to the IRS.

This effectiveness measure establishes a way for the Foundation to evaluate key resourcing trade-offs and their implications. It helps us in communicating these trade-offs to our stakeholders. It also helps us ensure that we allocate the largest part of our budget on activities that directly support our mission in line with or exceeding nonprofit sector best practices.

  • Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goal of Effectiveness.
  • Measurement: We will maintain our programmatic expense ratio at 77%.

Goals: Infrastructure[edit]

Advance Knowledge as a Service

Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors and functionaries. Strengthen metrics and reporting.

The work we do at the Wikimedia Foundation has many facets, and has been described as supporting a "socio-technical" ecosystem. Within that ecosystem, the Foundation provides critical technical services, designs and launches new products, and innovates in areas like machine learning and internet-based collaboration. The work described in our "Infrastructure" goal outlines some of the key objectives and priorities in these areas for the coming year.

As outlined in this year's External Trends section, this work is informed by four key trends:

  • Search: Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people
  • Content: Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online
  • Disinformation: Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and AI will be weaponized.
  • Regulation: compliance needs are growing and we need to increase global understanding of our community-based models

The importance of upgrading our technical infrastructure was also a recurring highlight in what we heard from volunteers in Talking: 2024.

Responding to these key themes – while also addressing the paradox that our projects are becoming both more vital to the knowledge infrastructure of the internet, while also becoming less visible to internet users – is the crux of the strategic challenge we face. In November 2023, the Foundation's Chief Product and Technology Officer posed a key question facing our Movement today: how do we ensure that Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects are "multigenerational?" How do we ensure a sustainable future, and fulfill the "in perpetuity" part of our mission?

After months of feedback and discussion this year, we identified the following pillars to help answer these questions and guide our decisions and planning around future work:

  • Shape a changing internet.  Much has changed over the past 23 years. We need to bring encyclopedic content and volunteering to an internet driven by AI and rich experiences. This is our least well-defined pillar, but it's where we take our mission to the world and make it real. We are investing in experiments to realize the vision of being the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge online, and to shape the future through collaboration on research into how AI can support or hinder peer-to-peer production systems like Wikipedia.
  • Fund the future of ‘free'. We will sustainably fund our movement by building unified product and revenue strategies together. We encourage a culture of philanthropy at the Foundation, will support Wikimedia Enterprise as a partner to our API-focused work, and make targeted investments in donor-facing work on our websites and apps. We will continually look for additional ways to do our work more sustainably and efficiently.
  • Deliver trustworthy encyclopedic content above all. We need to enable the Internet's fundamental source of knowledge by addressing disinformation, misinformation and missing information in our ecosystem. We will continue our work on identifying knowledge gaps, and equipping volunteers with tools to fill them. And we will develop comprehensive approaches to scaled abuse and overcoming barriers to encyclopedic contributions across all languages. This requires clarity about MediaWiki's purpose and greater coordination between paid staff and volunteer developers going forward. We must also make tough decisions about what projects and features we support, and what we will stop supporting.
  • Fuel volunteer growth. This is the underpinning of everything we are doing as a Foundation. We will do that by nurturing multiple generations of volunteers. For both experienced and new volunteers, we must ask the question: "Why should I volunteer?" With that vital question in mind, we must align volunteer growth and opportunities to contribute. One recent example is "structured tasks," which has helped us draw in and retain new active editors. But much more is needed to become more sustainable and multigenerational in our work with contributors. This is the highest priority, and where we must begin our strategic shift.

Infrastructure: sustaining and future-looking investments[edit]

Our technical infrastructure is the underlying framework of hardware, software, networks, and services that support the operation of the Wikimedia sites and services. This is the base upon which our digital services, applications, and processes are built and operated. Included are a wide range of components including: hardware, software, networks, digital services such as hosting and security that support the operation, and the modernization and upkeep of our platform in an evolving landscape. To serve all these needs, we allocate time for both sustaining and future-looking investments. The sustaining work is primarily driven by ongoing maintenance needs of the unique systems that support the creation and distribution of knowledge, and the need to respond to incidents within these ever changing socio-technical systems. This work arises regularly throughout the year, has time permanently allocated for it, and is described in more detail below. The future-looking investments are informed by the external trends and our priorities as an organization. They are set out in the objectives and key results (OKRs) below. The work of the P&T department involves understanding the priorities in both areas, and how we shift resources and make tradeoffs to fix the most urgent issues, solve enduring challenges, and meet the needs of where we need to be.

A change we've made this year is more deeply incorporating these OKRs with the three other Foundation-wide goals. As we deepen collaboration across the Foundation, you will see the Product and Technology department OKRs showing up in the sections for other goals as well as Infrastructure.

Sustaining the technical infrastructure: work needed to maintain and support Wikimedia projects and volunteers[edit]

"The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."

The Product and Technology teams dedicate a permanent, year-round priority to the maintenance, accessibility and operation of the wiki projects. This essential work starts with the fundamentals of developing and hosting a large popular website. We host our wiki projects in data centers, on servers and hardware we purchase, install and maintain, connected to each other and the rest of the Internet over a high speed network. We monitor and add capacity where needed, and refresh equipment when it gets too old. As an example, this year, we will be expanding our data center space in Carrollton, Texas, with some additional space and capacity for server equipment to keep up with growth of content and services on our projects.

We design and develop open-source software (most notably MediaWiki), and also use and deploy many existing third-party open-source applications, libraries and frameworks. Important bugs in our software get prioritized and fixed. Maintaining open source software requires highly skilled work from people with special expertise in open source software development, site reliability engineering (SRE), product management, program management, design, and more. Our staff work to ensure our software and systems are up to date and adapt to an ever-changing environment, including modernizing our code to continue to benefit from security fixes and to work well with new third-party software. For example, when software languages are updated, the old version becomes obsolete, meaning features don't work correctly. To avoid that we need to update our code to match. MediaWiki is written in PHP, and one of the things we need to do this year is to migrate from PHP 7.X to 8.3. Updating will make our systems more secure, load faster and be easier for staff and volunteers to work with them. This supports both a better experience for users and savings in terms of development time in the future thanks to security, performance and support improvements that come with language updates.

Over the past year, the unavailability of the Graph extension has been an ongoing technical challenge involving security and scalability considerations. This issue has affected readers and editors in many communities. In the coming year, we plan to build a new secure and scalable service to support the most common types of graphs used in the wikis, extensible for additional types of visualizations. We will work closely with community members as this plan becomes more defined.

To ensure our projects and content remain available on the Internet, in perpetuity, our teams dedicate a significant amount of effort on ensuring high-availability of our sites and services, and disaster recovery from catastrophic or malicious events. We ensure we have backups of important data, and are able to recover from them. Twice a year we test our ability to switch our sites between our data centers in automated fashion, and fix any issues we find.

Not all work is planned far in advance. We also respond to unexpected emerging events and incidents, like site outages, security reports or security incidents, or large scale vandalism attacks on our projects. We monitor our performance and barriers to reachability across the globe (including Internet connectivity problems, or censorship blocks), and investigate any anomalies we find. Some of these unexpected events or repeating patterns of problems result in staff prioritizing short-term follow-up projects that aim to mitigate or completely prevent further negative impact. As a concrete example: a pattern of availability incidents during high-profile celebrity deaths in the news used to overwhelm our wiki projects, infrastructure and services at all levels during the brief but very severe traffic spikes that followed. Through a combination of performance optimization, architectural redesign of bottlenecked areas, and capacity increases over several years, our projects and infrastructure have recently been able to withstand extreme, global traffic spikes (e.g. Queen Elizabeth's passing) without issues. The teams who do this work have knowledge about how to support billions of pageviews per month using open source technologies that are essential to the functioning of our socio-technical infrastructure.

Future-looking investments: objectives and key results[edit]

The Product and Technology teams also prioritize future-looking investment work. These are shared as "objectives and key results" (OKRs), whose impact tends to be framed as results that stakeholders or audiences can observe or experience directly. This is a continuation of the structure of work portfolios (called "buckets") that began last year.

We prioritized investments in three buckets: Wiki Experiences, Signals and Data Services, and Future Audiences. You can read more about why we chose these buckets in last year's annual plan. The Wiki Experiences work focuses on the experience of readers and contributors on the sites:  what they see and interact with on the wiki projects and in our apps. The work prioritized in the WE1 and WE3 below responds to the search and content external trends. WE2 responds to the content and disinformation trends, and is embedded in the Equity goal. WE4 responds to the disinformation trends and is embedded in the Safety and Integrity goal. Signals and Data Services focuses on insights into our content/metadata, making decisions on our content and services, and/or interacting with our content in structured or programmatic ways. Future Audiences focuses on experimenting with ways to invite new audiences into our Movement in direct and indirect ways and also aligns with the search and content external trends. You can find the specific objectives and key results for each below.

An "objective" is a high level direction that will shape the product and technology projects we take on for the next fiscal year. They're intentionally broad, represent the direction of our strategy and, importantly, what challenges we're proposing to prioritize among the many possible focus areas for the upcoming year. Each objective contains a few key results with measurable outcomes. Over the course of the year we describe multiple hypotheses that teams form for work, and we report quarterly on progress.

These objectives build off ideas we've been hearing from community members over the past several months through Talking:2024, on mailing lists and talk pages, and at community events about our product and technology strategy for the year ahead. You can view the full list of draft objectives below.

A note on budget planning: Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services.

These OKRs detail Product and Technology work that will happen in the service of the Infrastructure goal:

Goals: Equity[edit]

Support Knowledge Equity

Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via movement governance, equitable resource distribution, closing knowledge gaps, and connecting the movement.

Knowledge equity is about closing knowledge gaps, making it easier to participate in free knowledge, and ensuring that our projects and movement are representative of the world that we serve. As Wikimedia's strategic direction states: "as a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge."

As we support our projects to become more sustainable and multigenerational, we will advance this goal by supporting equity in relation to movement governance and decision making, resource distribution, knowledge creation, and connections. At a time when consumers have more ways to search for and discover knowledge, and creators have new opportunities and incentives to share it, Wikimedia projects stand out as an important alternative where we must continue to foster equity.

The work outlined under this year "Equity" goal responds to three key external trends:

  • Content: Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online
  • Search: Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people
  • Disinformation: Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and AI will be weaponized

In addition, throughout our discussions during Talking:2024, the human-led nature of our movement and the importance of making every contribution count repeatedly came up. We also heard that movement roles need greater clarity.

Movement Governance and Decision-Making[edit]

Maggie Dennis

As we advance into the third year of aligning our annual plan with the movement's 2030 Strategic Direction, our commitment to equity remains at the forefront. Knowledge equity asks us prioritize the knowledge and communities historically marginalized by existing power structures.

We believe that enhancing Equity in Decision-Making is a critical component to better coordinate our global network of communities and organizations for our stronger collective impact in the world. In this year's plan, we emphasize the focus on shared accountability, equitable participation, and supporting governance success across and for the movement. In essence, our journey this year is about empowering decision-makers across the movement, fostering environments where autonomy of movement groups is respected and supported, and ensuring that our governance practices are not only effective but also inclusive and inspiring to all involved.

We continue to support effective, impactful, and equitable decision-making. The Movement Charter, clarifying the future roles and responsibilities in the movement, including suggesting potential new structures like hubs and a Global Council, is nearing its completion following 2.5 years of work and movement-wide conversations. The Foundation has been engaging directly with the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) and other stakeholders to share perspectives and discuss what roles and responsibilities should be owned by different movement bodies. We share more about the immediate next steps in the Planning History section.

As this work is ongoing, we maintain our commitment to the advancement of regional and thematic Hubs and networks. We are ready to provide backbone services, including strategic support, facilitation, documentation and learning. We will also provide financial support and grants as part of the Movement Strategy Implementation Grants portfolio to more strategically enable Hubs and other core infrastructure of the movement.

While supporting the development of new and emerging governance structures, we will continue to support other key governance committees, here defined as committees with decision-making powers that have influence on the broader movement. These include but may not be limited to the Affiliations Committee, the Elections Committee, and the Foundation's own Board of Trustees. Our goal is to support these committees as appropriate in being successful in their mandate while respecting their autonomy. This year we have three major focuses: (1) Implementing and iterating committee support processes, including a central service inbox, to effectively process support requests and foster collaboration among stakeholders; (2) Supporting the Affiliations Committee with the evolving recognition process as well as creating tighter alignment among Foundation teams to appropriately assess and address affiliate challenges in collaboration with AffCom and the Board, and (3) coordinating the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections to support orderly elections with results that are considered legitimate by electors across the movement via the implementation of a new committee stakeholder accountability map.

We will also offer further training and development for volunteers interested in participating in movement governance committees, as well as onboarding support.

Resource Distribution[edit]

Yael Weissburg and Veronica Thamaini

In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with the movement, launched a refreshed grants strategy to align its grant distribution process with the Movement Strategy recommendation to increase the sustainability of the movement. As a result of the shift, grantmaking has grown each consecutive year and larger proportional growth taking place in regions we have historically underinvested in.

This year, we will continue to align our grantmaking with Movement Strategy, working with communities to support equitable resource distribution to facilitate the long-term growth and sustainability of the movement. We will be working with the 8 Regional Funds Committees and engaging Affiliates and community members to bring decision-making about funds allocations closer to the movement. We will collaboratively determine the regional allocations of the grantmaking portfolio. We will also work together to take concrete steps towards subsidiarity in resource distribution by moving decision-making about global campaigns and rapid funds grants to those closest to the work.

To facilitate better long-term planning and budgeting among Affiliates, this year we are publishing a three-year grantmaking budget (as opposed to the 1-year budget that has historically been published). We will also partner with interested Affiliates to develop their local and regional fundraising capacity, by offering tools, resources, and personnel support.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced the third round of its Knowledge Equity Fund in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. The Knowledge Equity Fund was established in 2020 to advance knowledge and racial equity goals and address barriers to free knowledge caused by racial inequity. Each round of grantmaking is spending down the initial amount set aside for the fund in 2020, and you can view the remaining balance on Meta. In the past fiscal year, the Equity Fund introduced new initiatives based on proactive community outreach and feedback (like Connected Grants that will be given to movement groups alongside external organizations they are partnering with to address the goals of the fund). This year we will continue to use the fund to explore new ways of achieving impact towards knowledge equity.

Closing Knowledge Gaps[edit]

Ben Vershbow, Fiona Romeo, Runa Bhattacharjee

The 2017 Strategic Direction affirms our role as a Movement to "break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge." This year, the Product and Technology department, together with staff across Advancement and Communications departments, will work together to support communities to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, accelerating growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.

Encyclopedic content, primarily on Wikipedia, can be increased and improved through continuous cycles of community enablement and technical innovation. Methods of identifying and closing knowledge gaps should be easier for editors and organizers to discover and plan with, and barriers to incubating and establishing new languages in our ecosystem must be reduced. Resources that support growth of quality encyclopedic content, including support services such as the Wikipedia Library, and community-organized vehicles like content campaigns and WikiProjects, can be better integrated with contribution workflows. In view of recent trends around AI-assisted content generation and changing user behavior, we will also explore groundwork for substantial changes (e.g. Wikifunctions) that can assist scaled growth in content creation and reuse.

Our priorities this year will be to:

  • Support organizers, contributors and institutions with tools, insights, and organizing approaches that increase the coverage of quality content in key topic areas.
  • Implement and test two recommendations, both social and technical, to support onboarding for small language communities, with an evaluation to analyze community feedback.
  • Launch two new contributor features and engage three to five institutional partners to enable easier contribution of source material that addresses language and geography gaps.
  • Enable Wikifunctions on at least one smaller language Wikipedia to seed new content and keep existing content updated in a scalable way.

Connecting the Movement[edit]

Mayur Paul

The Foundation's ability to work effectively as part of the larger Wikimedia Movement relies on forging equitable connections across the movement. Next year, we will build on our existing work in celebrating, connecting and convening to engage our movement. Building on the insights from the 2021 research from movement communications, we will focus on co-creation. We will connect the dots across the Foundation and become intentionally inclusive about how we engage and communicate. A lot of this will happen behind the scenes in service of the Foundation's overarching goals around Infrastructure, Equity, Safety & Integrity, and Effectiveness. Overall, we will strengthen a sense of connection and belonging in the Wikimedia Movement.

Our efforts will focus on four broad priorities:

  • Firstly, we want to make every contribution count. We will celebrate the humans behind our projects through programmes such as WikiCelebrate. We will celebrate the work of functionaries and non-content contributions through the upcoming Wikimedian of the Year awards. We also want to build recognition of Wikimedia contributions through certificates in WikiLearn and accreditations from professional and educational bodies. This includes humanizing the work of contributors of gender content in the movement by telling the stories of our collective efforts at addressing the Gender Gap and inspiring internal and external audiences to become new readers, contributors, or donors. This priority aligns with Infrastructure work to improve the contributor experience on Wikimedia projects.
  • We will deepen our regional connections through multicultural and multilingual communications to build two-way conversations informed by local knowledge. Our regional specialists will build on and maintain the many personal relationships they have forged in order to cultivate collaboration and shared understanding with local communities. We will listen and amplify local regional ambitions, stories, gatherings and more - beginning with this annual plan itself where we will use the process of engaging with the plan to elevate regional priorities and plans like the Africa Agenda. We will also co-create with regional communities shared spaces for people to connect like Afrika Baraza, WikiCauserie, CEE Catch Up, South Asia Open Community Call and more. As part of collaborating on this year's plans we joined many of these co-created spaces to hear about different community priorities, discuss how the work captured in the plan can support these priorities and answered questions about the annual plan.
  • Connecting globally and across regions also remains important. From movement spaces like Diff that enable Wikimedians to share and learn together, to creating clearer and more accessible structures of pages on Meta-Wiki, we will help people connect across regions. We had 238,594 visitors in the 2023 calendar year (24% more than 2022) and 436,612 views (11% more than 2022) from nearly all parts of the world to Diff last year. We will also continue the movement-led Let's Connect peer learning program and increase regional impact by developing resources for volunteers to host sessions in local languages and timezones. In support of both our Equity and Safety and Integrity goals, we will also work in partnership with affiliates to educate lawmakers about the Wikimedia model, and about the potential impact of over-broad laws that fail to take our model into account. We will work with volunteers to build local capacity to advance a positive vision for the legal and regulatory frameworks our communities need in order to thrive. During the annual plan collaboration period, Wikimedians also shared how they want to be able to connect to the Foundation more simply. We will continue the work we began in 2023 to improve the Foundation's presence on Meta-Wiki and build a clearer, more straightforward way for movement members to access resources and information from the Foundation. This involves improvements to team and department pages and staff listings, as well as a centralised support line allowing anyone to contact a human at the Foundation on any topic, at any time, and be connected with the right person or team to handle their question or request.
  • Finally, we will continue to help people come together to collaborate and co-create. This includes supporting the movement's flagship international event - Wikimania. The Africa Agenda notes how "Africa’s participation in global events and dialogues in our movement continues to be a major pain point for the region. For example, the inability to participate at the Wikimedia Summit due to visa issues may have affected participation in processes like the Movement Strategy." As part of a multi-year planning approach, the Wikimania Steering Committee  has set out hosts for Wikimanias in 2024, 2025 and 2026 including bringing Wikimania to East Africa for the first time. Equitable visa access for African scholars was a key part of this decision. We will work side by side with the core organizing teams of each of these Wikimanias to help plan the movement's flagship international event with both a virtual and in person component. This year the Wikimania 2024 Core Organizing Team (COT) will host Wikimania in Katowice between 7-10 August with the spirit "Collaboration of the Open". We will help them share lessons learnt from Wikimania with other conference organizers in the movement. We will also work with all movement organizers to co-create consistent support from the Foundation for movement conferences, including regional and thematic events. We will also continue to support the movement's flagship technical event, Wikimedia Hackathon, to convene experienced technical contributors to get the most daring experimental projects and bugs fixed and make sure that the technical community feels connected.


Increasing growth in encyclopedic content[edit]

Each goal in this year's annual plan is also supported by Product and Technology work.

The OKRs below detail that work for the Equity goal:

Goals: Safety & Integrity[edit]

Protect our people and projects

Strengthen the systems that provide safety for volunteers. Defend the integrity of our projects. Advance the environment for free knowledge.

Free access to trustworthy knowledge offered by the Wikimedia projects is more valuable than ever. In an era of escalating political and geopolitical conflict, coordinated disinformation campaigns, attacks against online freedoms, and widespread deployment of AI, the world needs Wikimedia.

All of our work to defend the safety of Wikimedia's people and the integrity of Wikimedia's projects is rooted in human rights principles, like our defense of freedom of expression and privacy, so that the projects can operate globally and equitably. The integrity of Wikimedia projects needs protection to resist external challenges and threats. Meanwhile, the laws governing online platforms continue to undergo an unprecedented amount of change globally. The Digital Service Act and the Online Safety Act are just two examples of an ongoing global trend. Amidst such unprecedented change, regulators will only protect and support Wikimedia people and projects to the extent that they understand the unique role Wikimedia projects play in advancing the public interest.

The work outlined under this year's Safety & Integrity goal responds to two key external trends:

  • The veracity of content is increasingly contested. Political and geopolitical conflicts are making it harder for editors and audiences to agree about facts, while AI is being weaponized to spread disinformation.
  • Regulation brings threats and opportunities that vary by jurisdiction.

As we also heard from volunteers in Talking: 2024, Wikimedia projects depend on people who are able to contribute while remaining safe, welcomed, and respected.

To provide for the safety of these volunteers and defend the integrity of Wikimedia projects, we will:

  1. Protect our People: Strengthen the policies and systems that provide for the safety of volunteers. We will do this by strengthening trust and safety on Wikimedia projects, protecting human rights when our projects are at risk, and building technology to prevent scaled abuse.
  2. Protect our Projects: Defend the integrity of our projects from attempts to limit access to knowledge. We will do this through legal defense and compliance, and countering disinformation.
  3. Advance our Model: Promote the value of Wikimedia's free knowledge model so that more people will help us protect it. We will do this by advancing a positive vision for internet policy that supports and protects the broader digital commons upon which Wikimedia depends.

Protect our people[edit]

We will strengthen the policies and systems that provide for the safety of volunteers. We'll do this by supporting community self-governance, protecting human rights when our projects are at risk, and strengthening trust and safety on Wikimedia projects.

We plan to continue to strengthen our support for community self-governance programs that handle user conduct matters, ensure the Wikimedia projects uphold the principles in the Universal Code of Conduct, and operate according to standards that meet Wikimedia's Human Rights Policy.

Trust & Safety[edit]

Our collaboration with communities in guiding our projects constructively forward is arguably our greatest strength. The Wikimedia Movement is based on the power and agility of crowdsourcing, enabling the projects to expand content and swiftly and transparently update information. Wikimedia's crowdsourced self-governance is also a key mechanism for trust & safety in our projects, allowing us to be far more nimble than a centralized staff-only model could ever be in not only keeping our sites legally compliant, but also in crafting and enforcing a truly global suite of governance policies that reflect the principles of the Wikimedia projects.

We support community self-governance by supporting committees largely or even often exclusively comprising volunteers. In this case, we refer to those committees consisting of members of our international body of volunteers who monitor content and address challenges in the behaviors of users on our sites. Their activities range from reviewing and resolving user disputes to evaluating administrator activity against our global policies to providing an appeal process for users subject to Foundation sanctions. They help bring in diversity of experience and perspectives and help ensure that such key workflows reflect our international Movement. Despite their commitment, these volunteers often face time constraints and challenges, including personal risks in some cases, particularly when their work involves curtailing abuse of our systems. We are here to help them.

Activities include:

  • Supporting the Case Review Committee, the Ombuds Commission, several NDA-holding Arbitration Committees, and the Stewards, as well as the likely newly seated Universal Code of Conduct Committee through liaising with staff as needed, training where appropriate, and administrative report tailored to the needs of the individual group;
  • Protecting administrators who are targeted by overzealous litigation;
  • Providing resources for content curators with a particular emphasis on site administrators to help keep them aware of the changing international landscape of legal concerns.
  • Working with volunteers to update and strengthen existing policies related to cross-project integrity.

Human rights[edit]

The Wikimedia movement both relies upon and enables human rights. Fundamentally, our projects enable every single person to seek, receive, and impart information as a critical human right. But the very process of curating, sharing, and contributing knowledge also has implications for fundamental rights centered around free expression, privacy, and equity, among others. We take seriously our role in supporting a safer environment in which information can be shared and received responsibly.

It is important to acknowledge that the Wikimedia Foundation does not and cannot stand alone in this work. We rely on our many volunteers who tirelessly scan the sites we host for material that violates the rights of others, whether that's removing unsourced material about human beings or content of unclear copyright status. We rely on a host of global partners who support our volunteers in times of danger, both offering them immediate relief and resources and advocating for their long-term good. We rely on many legislators and regulators and other policy makers who are committed to responsibly keeping information free for this generation and into the future.

Activities include:

  • Improving understanding of human rights in the context of Foundation work and Wikimedia projects to amplify the influence and impact we can have with decision makers, volunteers, and staff as key messengers for this work.
  • Strengthening the Foundation's ability to support and protect volunteers who face threats to their human rights in connection with their contributions to the projects;
  • Formalizing human rights due diligence processes so that staff and volunteers have the resources and knowledge frameworks necessary to identify potential risks to volunteers and others that may arise in the course of operating and governing Wikimedia projects;
  • Undertaking the first independent assessment of the Foundation's efforts to protect freedom of expression and privacy in relation to Wikimedia projects, as required as a member of the Global Network Initiative;
  • Reviewing and providing experimental support for technology that enhances volunteers' ability to safely contribute to the Wikimedia projects, as well as readers' ability to safely access all Wikimedia content, such as Wikimedia DNS.
  • Proactive outreach and communications around the work the Foundation is doing to protect the rights of readers and contributors to the Wikimedia projects to key audiences (public, movement, policymakers) to increase awareness and understanding.

Scaled Abuse[edit]

Each goal in this year's annual plan is also supported by Product and Technology work.

The OKRs below detail that work for the Safety & Integrity goal:

Protect our projects[edit]

Defend the integrity of our projects from attempts to limit access to knowledge. We will do this through legal defense and compliance, and countering disinformation.

Legal Defense and Compliance[edit]

In the past year, multiple new or proposed laws have focused on hosts of online platforms, and the Foundation has invested in a multi-pronged approach consisting of: legal analysis and evaluation, regulator education, legal defense, and compliance where doing so is consistent with human rights standards. In FY 24-25, we will continue to execute on this strategy.

Laws that do not take the Wikimedia model into account can have harmful consequences for our projects and the people who build them—such as censorship, arrest of editors, or costs that may disrupt Foundation operations—regardless of whether the harms are intended. When faced with laws that may have these unintended consequences, we work to educate lawmakers and regulators about the potential harms. Outreach and communications also serve as important avenues to raise awareness and, in some cases, garner public support for our goals.

When a proposed law is passed, we conduct a detailed review to understand if it could apply to the projects and/or Foundation, assessing it under our Applicable Law and Human Rights policies. Using this analysis, we determine whether the Foundation—in some cases, working with the communities of contributors—may want to consider taking action in response to the law.If any action is required, we will create an appropriate plan for any change that is required.

Legal developments can occur sometimes unexpectedly throughout the year, so this list cannot be comprehensive. We provide here a few examples of how we approach this challenge.

Activities include:

  • Working, in partnership with the Wikimedia communities, for a substantive update and overhaul of our Privacy Policy, to be completed and go into effect in fiscal year 2025-26. We will reinforce our commitment to protecting user data on the projects, while supporting Foundation and community developers in creating high-quality tools to protect users and the free knowledge they contribute and share from abuse and vandalism.
  • Complying with applicable laws as appropriate. Here are a few key examples of work for next fiscal year:
    • Continuing our Digital Services Act (DSA) compliance program, in response to this European Union significant legislation that impacts online hosts. In particular, next fiscal year, we will improve and refine our DSA transparency reporting, and will complete our first required audit.
    • Evaluating the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, and planning accordingly for any changes to Foundation operations that we assess as prudent. This law is one among many concerned with the online activities of children in particular, and we will look to our Child Rights Risk Assessment to guide future work that can increase safety on the Wikimedia projects.
  • This fiscal year, we expect a ruling in the US Supreme Court case Netchoice v. Paxton, which could significantly change the legal rules for hosting user-generated content and could present risks not only to the Foundation but to individual Wikipedians. Next fiscal year, we will work to defend the projects if the outcome gives rise to new lawsuits trying to remove content or harm users. We will also be looking at legislative options that may be advanced following the ruling and public facing communications activity that can help to reinforce our key messages.
  • Strengthening our collaboration with Wikimedia communities in some jurisdictions to advocate for needed reforms. In the jurisdictions with the most power to shape our projects, we will work with volunteers to advocate for legal reforms that better protect our projects and people from bad-faith litigation by people and entities seeking to advance their points of view or self-promoting narratives.
  • Expanding our program of strategic litigation to protect the Wikimedia projects, contributors, and model, in light of the changing regulatory environment. We will search for and evaluate opportunities to file amicus briefs in courts around the world, where the Foundation's voice may help local or international courts understand the impacts of the laws they interpret on Wikipedia. For example, we will look for useful test cases to help clarify and expand the public domain and to help ensure that defamation and right to be forgotten issues are clearly understood so that users know what types of content are safe to contribute to the projects in different places around the world. Where there is enough impact, we will consider opportunities in which the Foundation directly brings a legal action to support this work. In key jurisdictions, communications can help to amplify our key messages to key public and policy maker audiences.

Countering disinformation[edit]

The Foundation will continue working actively to strengthen our communities' ability to anticipate, prepare for, neutralize and ideally even prevent disinformation attacks.

Wikimedia projects are increasingly regarded as trusted sources of knowledge across the world. With an unprecedented number of elections worldwide in 2024 and rising geopolitical conflict, the truth is more contested than ever. There are examples of politicians and governments making deliberate efforts to discredit Wikipedia through disinformation campaigns in mainstream and social media. The open nature of the projects themselves make us vulnerable to information warfare, including disinformation (information shared with the intent to mislead).

Countering disinformation is closely connected to the broader work countering on-wiki misinformation (information that is inaccurate but not deliberately meant to mislead), part of the core work of volunteers. Supporting volunteers' work in improving information integrity of the wikis continues to be a key priority in 2024−2025.

Activities include:

  • Enhancements to investigations that identify disinformation on-wiki, in collaboration with volunteer functionaries and support from research and partnerships.
  • Strengthening and expanding moderator tools, including transparent and accountable use of machine learning in service of volunteers' efforts to identify and address disinformation.
  • Sharing information, tactics, and resources among functionaries and other key self-governance stakeholders and affiliates working to counter disinformation in their communities.
  • Improving policymakers' understanding of the Wikimedia model, and what types of laws and public policies can protect and support volunteers' ability to fight disinformation, in jurisdictions where laws have significant impact on the projects' operations.
  • Creating a new 2024 elections task force, to coordinate the work of the Foundation in countering disinformation during multiple global elections and supporting volunteers.
  • Strengthening relationships with external researchers who study online disinformation, thereby informing on-wiki disinformation tracking, improving access to a broader range of fact-checking resources, and improving access to external research about disinformation trends as they emerge on other platforms.
  • Public facing communications strategies will enable the Foundation to tell an effective story about the work happening to prevent mis and disinformation on the Wikimedia projects in key markets - India, EU and the US - during this critical election year.
  • Reinforcing awareness and value of our unique model, and how it provides an antidote to mis and disinformation to help enhance brand affinity and trust.

Advance our model[edit]

We will promote the value of Wikimedia's free knowledge model so that more people will help us protect it. We will do this by advancing a positive vision for internet policy that supports and protects the broader digital commons upon which Wikimedia depends.

As part of our legal and policy advocacy work, we represent the interests of the Wikimedia communities publicly through a range of proactive outreach and communications activities in key jurisdictions.We will educate policymakers and other stakeholders who influence them (like media, academics, and civil society groups) about how Wikimedia's model works, and how the projects contribute positively to society. We look for ways to make the legal and regulatory environment of the movement more favorable for safe and inclusive contributions. We will advocate for a positive vision of internet policy that advances free knowledge in the context of our work. We advocate against government laws, regulations or behaviors that threaten the open internet upon which our communities depend. This advocacy is prioritized based on Wikimedia's opportunity to have impact and the relevance of the issue for Wikimedia's people and projects.

Results include:

  • We will have deepened and expanded partnerships with affiliates and volunteers to educate policymakers, governments, and other stakeholders about Wikimedia's model of community governance. This will help our external stakeholders understand how the Foundation supports the movement, and what types of laws and public policies can protect and promote volunteers' ability to share well-sourced information responsibly;
  • Support and coordination for affiliates and volunteers advocating for copyright reforms will be further strengthened to ensure that the law protects and supports the use of free and open licensing, and that governments make works and content freely available;
  • We have identified potential test cases for impact litigation to help clarify and expand the public domain and to help ensure that defamation and right to be forgotten issues are clearly understood, so that users know what types of content are safe to contribute to the Wikimedia projects in different places around the world.
  • Partnerships with researchers are broadened for the purpose of collecting and disseminating empirical, independent research of the impact of the Wikimedia projects.This research will be key to providing clear evidence that we can cite to policymakers and media of how the Wikimedia movement advances the public interest by contributing to the economic and social well being of people in particular communities and countries.
  • Our UN engagement strategy produces improved understanding by stakeholders across the UN system of how the Wikimedia projects contribute directly to the Sustainable Development Goals.
  • Policymakers in key international organizations and intergovernmental bodies recognize that Wikimedia projects are an important ingredient of digital public infrastructure that must be supported and protected.
  • Relationships with human rights and civil society organizations are strengthened. As a result of their improved understanding of Wikimedia's governance model and our communities' contributions to knowledge equity, more allies will vocally advocate for policy positions that protect Wikimedia projects as a public good.
  • Policymakers and policy influencers (media, civil society, etc) in countries whose laws have a direct impact on the projects are educated about how Wikimedia communities develop and deploy machine learning tools that support volunteers' efforts to improve the encyclopedic quality of the projects and fight disinformation;
  • Policymakers and policy influencers gain an improved understanding of the emerging relationship between free knowledge projects, including the Wikimedia projects, and generative AI; and how and why laws and regulations should protect Wikimedia's human-centric technology development and content governance model in service of the public interest.

Goals: Effectiveness[edit]

Strengthen performance and effectiveness

Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

To respond to a rapidly changing world, we need an effective and resilient organization committed to delivering the maximum impact possible, given our resources and role as responsible stewards of donor funds. Movement Strategy recommendation #10 guides us to "adapt to meet new and altered situations and challenges by adopting policies and procedures based upon evaluations of the changing Movement and the changing world." This is what we set out to accomplish in the Foundation's Effectiveness Goal.

Last year, the Foundation advanced our Enterprise Risk Management program by identifying the highest risks to the Foundation and mitigation plans for these risks.  We harmonized our translation and interpretation program which allowed us to grow from 6 to 34 languages translated and from 0 to 9 interpreted while reducing costs. We deployed new workflows and systems to power our work that will lead to higher service levels and sustained costs, including a new HR system and a new tool and workflow for staff travel. We refreshed our organizational values and embedded them into our recruiting process so we can continue to attract the best talent. We also continued to develop and support our employee resource groups.

This year, the Foundation will continue developing a more diversified revenue strategy to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of our mission. We are focusing our people and strengthening our processes to improve performance and effectiveness. This will enable us to deliver the maximum impact towards our mission with our resources.

This work is informed in part by the following External Trend:

  • Search: Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people.

As consumers increasingly shift how they search for and consume content online, it is becoming more difficult to raise funds through the primary revenue banner stream that has traditionally funded Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. Ensuring the financial sustainability of our mission is a core responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we will continue to commit to making the best and most efficient possible use of our funds. (See the financial section below for information on the Wikimedia Foundation's financial model, our goals to raise our annual fund, and how we're investing in  long-term revenue initiatives like the Wikimedia Endowment and Wikimedia Enterprise.)

The Talking: 2024 conversations we've been having with movement entities also highlighted the need for multi-year financial certainty in financial support from the Foundation. This year we will work to ensure affiliates are well-positioned to engage in multi-year budgeting and planning. We will work directly with the Regional Funds Committees to offer a three-year view of the Foundation's grantmaking budget, and make joint decisions on how movement funds should be distributed over the next three years.

Centering our people to enhance staff experience[edit]

Compensating and developing our staff is the Foundation's biggest financial investment. Of course, enabling our staff to do their best work goes beyond financial remuneration. We want our staff to enjoy their work and be able to focus on advancing our mission, not navigating our systems. Investments made to improve our staff experience increase both individual and team productivity, and thus the Foundation's overall effectiveness. In the year ahead, we will continue to complete comprehensive evaluations of our HR offerings, policies, procedures and experiences and make impactful changes where needed. We are currently exploring initiatives to strengthen managerial capabilities, align our performance management system with our compensation structures and further embed our values and DEI best practices into our policies, practices and processes. Our goal is not only to make sure that everyone feels valued, heard, and integral to our collective success, but also to enrich our workplace and empower our staff to thrive.

Evolve processes and the way we work to strengthen our effectiveness[edit]

Our workflows, systems, and cycles serve as operational tools to help us complete our work efficiently and effectively. Part of our efforts to build an effective organization is to evaluate, iterate, and adapt processes, infrastructure, and ways of working for the maximum impact of our resources. In the year ahead, we will work to:

  • Improve fundraising infrastructure, making our current and future fundraising efforts more effective and efficient.
  • Further develop our Enterprise Risk Management program to fully integrate risk management activities into our daily operations and measures.
  • Provide operational support to staff, including meeting in person and virtual gathering needs as we continue to evolve as a globally distributed organization across 50+ countries. This includes moving to a smaller office as our lease ends in 2024, and identifying more flexible and cost-efficient options for in person convenings.
  • Evolve our quarterly review and decision-making cycles to better serve our annual plan goals.

Every goal in the annual plan is supported by Product and Technology work.

The OKRs below detail Product and Technology work that will happen in service of the Effectiveness goal:

Financial model[edit]

Continued modest budget growth[edit]

This time last year, we found ourselves in an uncertain environment with expected flattening revenue growth into the future. Our projections indicated that, for a range of reasons, fundraising online and through banners would not continue to grow at the same rate as in past years.

As a result, we reduced internal expenses and found cost efficiencies in some areas to fund increases in other areas, including funding increases in grants and maintaining funding for Product & Technology.

As we plan for 2024–2025 and beyond, we expect to continue to contend with a period of economic, socio-cultural, and technical uncertainty. Several external trends we noted this year are ongoing, and new ones are emerging. While inflation appears to be moderating in some places, it remains elevated in others.

Planning our future income streams and becoming more cost-efficient[edit]

In 2024-2025 we are further developing our multi-year financial models to prepare plans and scenarios ready to respond to a changing and uncertain environment.

Our current modeling suggests that we can expect modest revenue growth of about 5% in 2024-2025 and by +/-5% for the following two years.

We have several long-term initiatives underway to help mitigate this risk and diversify our revenue streams, including the following.

  • We are enabling the essential role of the Wikimedia Endowment in growing long-term support for the projects.
  • We are continuing to assess Wikimedia Enterprise's ability to improve readers' user experience beyond our websites while simultaneously having very high-volume reuse companies financially support our movement.
  • We are testing new fundraising channels that have the opportunity to generate revenue.

On the expense side, following our work to reduce expenses last year, we are continuing to slow the rate of growth for the Foundation itself while increasing financial resources that support other movement entities. We are finding ways to become more efficient and reduce our ongoing costs. This year we will be downsizing our office space which will reduce our expenses by $500k in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024–2025 and over $1M in future years. We are also identifying opportunities to streamline our operations, negotiate recurring contracts, and eliminate inefficiencies in how we work in order to become more cost efficient.

Our most significant investment is in our staff, and the most important decision we make is deciding what to spend our time working on. It is our staff who operate our data centers to keep a top 10 website running, build features and functionality to deliver free knowledge world-wide, provide legal defense for our people and projects, provide support to our volunteers and affiliates, and much more.

We built this multi-year model to maintain our reserve around its current level and within the Board's set policy of 12-18 months to position the Foundation well to face the expected continued uncertainty. We will also stay in line with non-profit financial best practices in areas such as the percentage of budget spent on programmatic expenses.

Revenue Strategy[edit]

Megan Hernandez

2024-2025 Revenue Objectives
Continue to improve the fundraising methods that have driven our past growth in order to meet our current needs.
Invest in longer-term strategies that will provide increased revenue in a future where Wikipedia content is primarily consumed off our platform.
Make improvements to our fundraising infrastructure to increase our efficiency.

Over the last decade, the Wikimedia Foundation has been building a robust and diversified revenue strategy that anticipates significant changes ahead for how people consume Wikipedia content. We were able to grow revenue for the movement over the last decade, driven largely through donations made by our readers via banners on Wikipedia. As the Internet has evolved and people are increasingly consuming Wikipedia content off our platform, it became clear that our revenue strategy could no longer primarily depend on donations made on Wikipedia. We began developing new revenue channels that were more resilient to changing readership trends: Wikimedia Enterprise, the Wikimedia Endowment, and a growing Major Gifts program. However, reader donations – those that come from 7.5 million people around the world and average around USD $11 – remain a vital part of our revenue mix and there is still potential to grow these channels that are so critical to our success in the near and medium-term. In FY 24-25, we will continue to optimize the reader donation channels that have been the bulk of our revenue in the past, while also further developing the long-term revenue channels that are likely to propel our revenue growth in the future.

Product and Revenue "dance partners"[edit]

Megan Hernandez In last year's plan, we introduced the concept of Product and Revenue "dance partners" to explain how Product and Revenue strategies are interconnected and rely on each other. The changing online environment and a future where readers may no longer primarily read content directly on Wikipedia requires us to lean further into this concept. We are building a unified Product and Revenue strategy for long-term resilience, especially as it relates to Wikimedia Enterprise and how Wikipedia content is reused.

Near and Medium Term Revenue Strategies[edit]

Megan Hernandez

In the year ahead, the Foundation will raise $188.75 million for the annual fund, five percent more than our prior year budget. We will do this primarily through a combination of systematic improvements to banner and email fundraising. We will also improve the donor experience to further develop monthly recurring giving, and other growing channels. These improvements are aimed to improve the way we reach new donors, continue to retain them year-over-year, and build relationships for longer-term support and engagement in the movement.

The Foundation will invest in launching new fundraising channels that reach our readers off platform, including direct mail and SMS, to diversify revenue streams for a more resilient fundraising program. We will continue to explore starting fundraising campaigns in additional countries to give more readers around the world the opportunity to support our mission.

Over the past year, the Foundation and volunteer communities have worked together to include our various stakeholders in asking readers to support our mission. In the year ahead, we will further engage the communities in fundraising strategy and collaborate with key stakeholders to enable effective fundraising. Fundraising must strike the right balance in maximizing revenue and the impact of our fundraising activities on readers and volunteers.

Improvement to our Fundraising Infrastructure[edit]

Megan Hernandez

The Foundation will also improve our fundraising infrastructure to make our current and future fundraising efforts more effective and efficient. This includes improvements to our payments and other technical fundraising infrastructure. As the fundraising program evolves, we will evaluate, iterate, and adapt our systems and processes to ensure maximum impact for our efforts.

Long-term Revenue Strategies[edit]

Wikimedia Endowment[edit]

Caitlin Virtue

How does the Wikimedia Endowment work?
  • Give: Gifts to the Endowment form the fund's principal (Principal)
  • Grow: The principal is invested and the fund grows over time (Earnings)
  • Grant: A portion of the investment earnings are granted to support Wikimedia projects - forever (Grants)

Launched in 2016, the Wikimedia Endowment is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 charity providing a permanent safekeeping fund to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. As a financial endowment, its principal (or "corpus") value is intended to be kept forever intact, while a portion of the fund may be spent each year. While gifts to the Wikimedia Foundation's annual fund are spent on immediate needs in the current fiscal year, gifts to the Wikimedia Endowment are never spent. Rather, they are invested alongside other endowment gifts so that they can generate returns year after year. Over the long term, every gift to the endowment will ultimately return more funds to the Wikimedia projects than if the donor had made a single gift to the annual fund. The Endowment is a vital way that we are increasing the financial sustainability of our Movement. The Wikimedia Endowment Board has authorized a second multi-year fundraising campaign that will allow the endowment to return even greater support for Wikimedia projects for years to come.

Legacy Giving[edit]

Caitlin Virtue

Legacy giving is a way of collecting pledges for future donations, most commonly through gifts in wills and beneficiary designations. The Wikimedia Endowment has partnered with FreeWill, a free online tool to create a legal will in the United States, to make it easy for those who wish to make a legacy gift to the Endowment. We will also continue to mature our legacy giving program by adding new ways to give and increasing our outreach to potential future legacy donors. We aim to build a pipeline of legacy giving commitments that will come to fruition in stages over the coming years. By 2050, legacy gifts could be the primary funding source for the Endowment.

Grants to support the Technical Innovation of the Wikimedia Projects[edit]

Caitlin Virtue

The Wikimedia Endowment, still in its early years, is already providing financial support to the WIkimedia projects. In January 2023, the Endowment Board approved its first grants to fund technical innovation on Wikimedia projects, to ensure they stay relevant in a rapidly-changing technology landscape. The Wikimedia Endowment Board approves grants each year in accordance with its spending policy. More information about the Wikimedia Endowment's plans for the coming year will be released in July 2024 in its own annual plan.

Wikimedia Enterprise[edit]

Wikimedia Enterprise is a commercial service available to high-volume re-users of Wikimedia content. It provides improved data access, customer support, service level guarantees (SLAs), and professional consulting to high-volume re-users of Wikimedia content. Wikimedia Enterprise exists to serve three interrelated Foundation and Movement goals:

  • Revenue: As readership of Wikimedia projects shifts from visits to our websites to various third party environments, Wikimedia Enterprise is intended to replace at least some of the revenue lost from fundraising channels that depend on direct communication with readers, such as fundraising banners. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a consistent and predictable way for large scale re-users of Wikimedia content to reinvest back into the movement a meaningful portion of the benefit they derive from our data.
  • Resource Management: Commercial re-users of Wikimedia content often access Wikimedia servers at a significantly higher rate than non-commercial re-users, placing a larger burden on our computing resources than other re-users or website visitors. Wikimedia Enterprise shifts the burden of supporting high-intensity usage and site-scraping by third party reusers from our primary service onto the Enterprise platform, allowing Wikimedia resources to be more equitably distributed to all visitors to our content.
  • Data and Understanding: Through qualitative and quantitative data collection, Wikimedia Enterprise has begun to develop a better understanding of the contexts in which Wikimedia data is used outside our own websites. This data collection provides the Enterprise team with necessary insights needed to develop commercially desirable features, functionality, and data formats to better support content reuse. It also helps the Foundation and the Movement better understand all the ways and environments in which Wikimedia content is put into the world via third party re-use.

In the coming year, Wikimedia Enterprise will deliver two significant updates to drive future revenue growth:

  • Embracing the AI marketplace as a growth engine: Though initially targeted at the search engine market, recent growth in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) market provides a major opportunity for Wikimedia Enterprise. The AI marketplace, much like the search engine marketplace, requires consistent, up-to-date access to Wikimedia data on a regular and recurring basis.
    Wikimedia data is used extensively by every major and minor player in the AI marketplace, and our data plays a significant role in all stages of AI development: in the training process, which is used to generate the core AI models; in post-training fine-tuning of these AI models; and via the expression of these models in tools such as generative chat, like ChatGPT. Commercial opportunities exist with both AI companies building foundational AI tools as well as companies using these tools to develop AI-powered business models.
  • Creating a free tier of our service to drive usage and purchase: At present, access to Wikimedia Enterprise for anything beyond lightweight trial usage requires entering into a signed contractual agreement with our team. This is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to using the service.
    In the coming fiscal year, Wikimedia Enterprise will launch a "software-as-a-service" model, which will provide a consistent and highly usable free tier of access to the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. Anyone who signs up for a Wikimedia Enterprise account will be able to build their external service on top of the Enterprise APIs at no cost, as long as they stay within stated usage limits. This will provide a clear ramp to payment for those who need to exceed these limits. This approach should open up access to a much wider range of possible uses for the Wikimedia Enterprise platform, some percentage of which will expand into meaningful commercial relationships.

For the fiscal year (FY) 2022-23, Wikimedia Enterprise earned 3.2 million dollars in revenue, as detailed in the team's most recent financial report.

Culture of Philanthropy and Expanding Major Gifts[edit]

Caitlin Virtue

We have been working to grow a culture of philanthropy at the Foundation. In this culture, all staff understand our commitment to financial sustainability and that each of us is an ambassador for the organization's service. In the coming year, we will create more opportunities for staff to engage in actions supporting accountability and connection to donors. Staff across the Foundation will embrace donors as key stakeholders in fulfilling our mission and take actions to serve this audience including sharing impact stories, participating in public awareness campaigns, attending donor-awareness trainings, and attending donor meetings and events. We will add an item to each Director-level, Vice President, and C-Team job description detailing their responsibilities about ambassadorship for the Foundation and our movement to donors and the general public.

Budget details[edit]

Budget Breakdown[edit]

James Baldwin

Budget by Goal Budget (in millions USD) % of Budget % of staff
Infrastructure $92.8 49.2% 57%
Equity $32.8 17.4% 11%
Safety & Integrity $18.5 9.8% 10%
Effectiveness $44.7 23.7% 22%
Total $188.7

In 2024-2025, we will continue to align our budget resource allocation with the four goals of our annual plan. While much of the budget is allocated to Infrastructure, the work that goes into creating and improving our infrastructure is, in many cases, also supporting the work happening in other goals. Similar work happening in other goals also supports our infrastructure work.

Growing investment in Infrastructure[edit]

James Baldwin and Selena Deckelmann-WMF

Our Infrastructure goal still reflects the most significant investment area. This includes our work to deliver on wiki experiences that enable the distribution of free knowledge worldwide; run and support a top-10 global website; enable data, models, insights, and tools that can help assess the impact of our work; explore strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of consumers and contributors; provide all of the critical functions which must exist at the Foundation to support our basic operations; and all of the other work described in our infrastructure goal. It includes the costs of all of the teams that do this work, the cost of running our data centers, and more.

Since 2022-2023, our total investment in Infrastructure has grown from $74.7M to $92.8M, representing a growing proportion of our budget from 44.2% to 49.2%. It reflects our continued focus on centering the Foundation's role to support the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement.

Prioritizing support for the Movement[edit]

James Baldwin and Yael Weissburg

Most of the budget for our Equity goal goes to direct movement support in the form of grants to affiliates, professional staffing for volunteer committees (e.g. AffCom, Regional Funds Committees) and support for peer-learning and movement-wide connection and collaboration.

Because of our commitment to the financial sustainability of movement entities that rely on funding from these resources, our 2024-2025 budget prioritizes larger growth in direct movement funding than our general growth as an organization. The overall budget for grants and movement funding will increase by 9% next year, compared to approximately 5% for the Foundation's overall expenses. This growth enables regional budgets to keep up with global inflationary increases, support some newcomers to the Movement, and increase funding for movement events and gatherings.

Our ongoing commitment to prioritizing direct funding to Wikimedia affiliates, user groups, and volunteers is reflected in the relative growth of grants and movement support as a percentage of our budget, which funds these groups. It has grown from 8.8% to 14.3% of our budget over the last five years.

Enabling multi-year planning in the movement. This year, we will also be advancing support for longer-term planning in the movement by providing a multi-year view of expected budgets for our grant programs. It will equip affiliates with the information they need for sustainable budgeting and planning.

Our financial modeling suggests that our overall budget will grow by about 5% per year in 2025-2026 and 2026-2027, enabling a similar growth in overall grantmaking. If our revenue growth changes in those years, we plan to grow our grantmaking to at least as much as our overall revenue growth.

The chart below shows the expected grantmaking. The Grants Budget bar shows our combined grant programs, such as the Community Support Fund, Conference Fund, and Rapid Fund. The Wikidata support section of the chart shows the Foundation's funding for work on Wikidata. The current collaboration agreement will be completed by the end of 2024-2025, and the next phase of the project will be determined over the next year.

As described in our Effectiveness Goal, we will work directly with the Regional Funds Committee to decide how movement funds should be distributed over the next three years.


Programmatic / Fundraising / General & Administrative Expenses[edit]

James Baldwin

Budget by Expense Type (in millions USD)
Programmatic $145.1
Fundraising $21.2
General & Admin $22.4

In 2024-2025, the proportion of the Foundation's budget funding direct work on the mission, also called "Programmatic Expenses," is planned to be about 77% of the budget, similar to the level we expect in 2023-2024.

Our goal for this programmatic expense ratio is to align with nonprofit sector best practices. Independent charity assessment organizations like Charity Navigator help establish these best practices. Charity Navigator sets its benchmark for highest-scoring nonprofits as exceeding >70% programmatic expenses.

Every year, we ensure that we significantly exceed Charity Navigator's >70% best practice target and work to ensure our organization operates efficiently and effectively. That is how we've been able to average over >75% in recent years.

We will maintain our top-rated charity status while also increasing our fundraising investment. In last year's plan, we described an anticipated increase in fundraising costs in the years to come as we are planning for more growth in major gifts, email fundraising, and other newer channels that are less efficient than banner fundraising. Continuing to diversify our revenue channels is critical for a more resilient fundraising program. We understand that it will slightly impact our fundraising and programmatic ratios.

Staff overview[edit]

Staff at the Foundation are a group of over 640 people who collectively speak over 75 languages (and counting!) and span almost every timezone, across all eight Wikimedia regions. The Foundation will share this snapshot of total headcount, geographic distribution, and growth analytics on a yearly basis in the Annual Plan.

At a Glance on 31 December 2023
Our total headcount 644 We had 644 total Foundation staff on 31 December 2023.

This number includes employees at the Foundation, at Employers of Record, and fixed-term contractors who have been at the Foundation for 6 months or longer.

Countries 54 Our people are located across 54 countries and all continents except Antarctica.
Growth in headcount -9% The headcount has decreased by 9% in the past 12 months (Dec 2022 – Dec 2023).
Non-US Workers 49% 49% of our workers are located outside of the USA.
Tenure in years 4.2 Staff members are staying on the average for about 4.2 years.

Collaboration[edit]

Engagement[edit]

Over the last few years we have continued to evolve and improve a collaborative planning process – the Wikimedia Foundation’s focus remains centered on humans and technology given the Foundation’s unique role as the platform provider for people and communities who are leading peer-to-peer knowledge production systems. The four overarching goals (Equity, Infrastructure, Safety, Effectiveness) remain constant, while the work and deliverables within them iterates on the significant progress made in the current year.

The discussions began this year with Talking:2024 - conversations between Foundation staff, leaders, board members, and Wikimedians around the world. They were followed by an invitation from Chief Product & Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann for input on-wiki into proposed objectives for the Foundation’s product and technology work next year. These objectives build on ongoing conversations through Talking:2024, which highlighted the importance of continuing focus on the needs of our platform and online contributors.

We welcome your ideas now through 31st May 2024 and will update this page as new on-wiki and live discussions open in various channels and languages. These discussions are where the Wikimedians share their take on the proposed plans and share about their own goals for the upcoming year. Inspired by what so many others are doing in their own work, we continue to find opportunities to collaborate and learn from the planning processes and work of others in the Wikimedia movement as well as other partners. This year there are many ways to engage: here on Meta-Wiki, in co-created community spaces, on Wikimedia project pages, and on community channels.

Co-created Community spaces[edit]

This year, staff and leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation will be joining existing community organized calls for two-way planning around next year’s draft annual plan. Additionally, Foundation staff are organizing several thematic calls that anyone can attend based on their area of interest. If you wish to join a call but interpretation is not available in your preferred language, email us at movementcomms@wikimedia.org, and we will make the necessary arrangements. Please note that the list will be regularly updated as dates are finalized to ensure you have the most up-to-date information.

  1. Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee Conversation with Trustees: .
  2. WikiCauserie: , interpretation available: English - French.
  3. MENA Community call , interpretations available: English - Arabic.
  4. CEE Catch up: , interpretations available: English - Russian
  5. Annual Planning Session at ESEAP Conference 2024: . Etherpad notes
  6. Product and Technology Focused Session at Indic Community Monthly Engagement Calls (by CIS-A2K ): May 11, 2024 (1300-1430 UTC)
  7. Igbo Wikimedia Open Community Call: .
  8. Cross-regional meeting: May 15, 2024 (15.00-16.30 UTC), interpretation available: English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish.
  9. Wikimedia AI call: May 16, 2024 (14.00-15.00 UTC). Interpretation: TBD
  10. Afrika Baraza: , interpretation available: English – French, Arabic and Swahili. Etherpad notes.
  11. Annual Planning Session during the South Asia Open call: .
  12. Annual Planning Discussion during the Naija Office Hours:


On-Wiki[edit]

A summary message to engage in annual plan conversation will be posted locally on various projects. The full version of draft annual plan materials with accompanying translations will live on this Meta-Wiki portal. You can collaborate with us on both local talk pages and here on the Meta-Wiki talk page, always in your preferred language. We will add links here to where the content has been posted as they become available.

Other conversations about the annual planning are also happening in other community channels on Discord and Telegram. We encourage you to join the discussions if you subscribe to these channels.

Product-specific conversations will happen in different channels. The conversations are between members of communities who collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation Product teams that own objectives and key results in the annual plan. Community members interested in specific objectives and key results owned by Product teams can engage with the teams for work details of the objectives they own, its implementation, and alignment with the communities' work and interests.

The engagements are opportunities to ask questions and get clarification on the product teams' outlined work for the 2024–25 year based on the annual plan objectives and key results. We will add links to places where product teams are engaging with their audiences when they become available.

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